By Doug Smith, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Lutzie 43 Foundation
I was in Minneapolis last week for the Governors Highway Safety Association Annual Meeting. The theme printed on every badge was From Data to Action: Harnessing the Technology Revolution.
Two statements bookended the week for me.
On the opening morning, NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison challenged the room:
“Yesterday’s approaches won’t deliver the meaningful changes we need today.”
By the end of the week, StopDistractions.org CEO Jennifer Smith had said the same thing from inside the field.
We’re ready to be done with silos, “our solutions are not siloed, why would we be?”, and it’s time to “dream up bigger solutions.”
Innovation. Collaboration. Boldness. Three days of programming, and those were the load-bearing beams.
A mentor of mine once told me a rut is just a grave with both ends dug out. That line’s stuck with me for years, and it’s what I kept hearing underneath every conversation I had last week. The rut in roadway safety isn’t ignorance. It’s that we keep funding the same shape of work, at the same scale, through the same channels, and then act surprised when the year ends about where the last one did. The trend is finally bending, and I’ll give it credit in a minute, but single-digit progress against a number that size still leaves tens of thousands of families burying somebody over a decision that never had to be made.
So, here’s what this month is about: the four behaviors that produce that number, what corporate education can actually change about them, and one contribution Corporate America is uniquely built to make that almost nobody’s making yet.
The Numbers Are Improving. That’s the Most Dangerous Sentence in This Series.
Good news first, because it’s real, and because you’re going to hear it from someone in your own building the minute you propose spending money on this.
NHTSA’s early estimate puts 2025 traffic deaths at 36,640, down about 6.7% from 39,254 in 2024. The fatality rate fell to 1.10 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. Deaths dropped in every single month of 2025 compared with the same month a year before. And the first quarter of 2026 came in at 7,770, down another 4.3%. That’s the sixteenth straight quarterly decline, going back to the spring of 2022.
That’s real progress, and the roadway safety officials, professionals and advocates in that Minneapolis ballroom earned it.
It’s also the best argument your CFO has for keeping roadway safety out of the 2027 budget. Trending the right direction is how a cause quietly loses its line item.
Two things are true at once. The trend is improving, and 36,640 deaths is still one hundred Americans a day.
Then put a price on it. Anthony Abron, Director of Government Affairs at the National Safety Council, laid 2025 out in Minneapolis as a single equation: 36,640 deaths and $559.3 billion in total societal loss.
36,640 lives. $559.3 billion. That’s one year on American roads.
That’s the whole bill, not just the visible part of it, medical care, wage and productivity losses, property damage, administrative and employer costs. And NSC’s own preliminary count for 2025 runs higher than the federal estimate, at 37,810 deaths, which is its own quiet comment on how much of this we’re still not capturing.
So, look at which categories actually moved. That’s where the lesson for you is hiding.
- Unrestrained passenger vehicle occupants: 10,994 killed in 2024, an estimated 9,546 in 2025, down 13%, the steepest drop of anything NHTSA tracked.
- Speeding-related deaths: 11,288 in 2024, an estimated 10,035 in 2025, down 11%.
- Motorcyclists (down 8%) and pedestrians (down 8%) improved. Pedalcyclist deaths went up 4%.
The two categories that fell fastest are the two that decades of repetitive, unglamorous behavior work have hammered on the hardest. Belts and speed didn’t improve because somebody got clever with the message. They improved because the message never stopped, and because enforcement, engineering, and employers all pushed the same direction for years.
That’s your ROI case, and it’s sitting right there in a federal table. Behavior change works when somebody funds it long enough to compound.
Four Behaviors, and One Number That Should End the Debate
For the full picture you have to go back to 2024, the last year with final crash data. Sort those 39,254 deaths by cause and the list is short, repetitive, and almost entirely behavioral:
- Impairment. 11,904 people killed in alcohol-impaired crashes. One death every 44 minutes.
- Speed. 11,288 people killed in speeding-related crashes, 29% of all traffic deaths.
- Distraction. 3,208 people killed in crashes involving a distracted driver, and 315,167 injured. Treat that as a floor, not a ceiling. Distraction gets coded from whatever an officer can determine at the scene, and phones don’t leave skid marks.
- Restraint. Of the 22,713 passenger vehicle occupants killed, 48% weren’t buckled.
Now hold that last one against this: national seat belt use hit 91.3% in 2025.
Nine out of ten Americans buckle up. Roughly half of the Americans who die inside passenger vehicles didn’t. That gap is the most useful piece of data in this whole series, because it kills the comfortable explanation. Those ten thousand people weren’t uninformed. They weren’t waiting on a statistic. They’d heard the message their entire lives, and in the seconds before the car moved, they didn’t act on it.
Knowledge is not the variable. Habit is.
That’s why the 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative from the Lutzie 43 Foundation is built the way it is. Clear Head. Clear Hands. Clear Eyes. Click It. Those four checks and habits aren’t marketing symmetry, they’re the four causes above, in the order a driver meets them, small enough to finish before the car moves. Mentally present and unimpaired. Phone away. Eyes up and scanning. Belt on for every person in the vehicle, every trip.
What Corporate Education Changes, and What It’s Missing Right Now
Here’s where I want to be careful. There’s a version of this article that flatters corporate safety departments, and it wouldn’t be worth your time.
In 2024, transportation incidents were the most frequent cause of fatal work injury in the country, 38.2% of all occupational deaths. Roadway crashes killed 1,146 workers on the job. And crashes cost U.S. employers roughly $62 billion a year in direct expenses: medical care, liability, lost productivity, property damage. That’s the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety’s (NETS) number, not mine. Hold that against Abron’s $559.3 billion. The $62 billion is only the slice that lands directly on your books.
Your fleet policy, your defensive driving module, and your telematics program cover the on-the-clock piece of that. It’s the piece you can see, and it’s the smaller one.
The same employee who finished your fleet training at 7 a.m. is driving a personal vehicle at 9 p.m. with a spouse in the passenger seat and a phone in the cupholder. That trip is invisible to your safety dashboard and completely visible to your health plan, your leave and disability lines, and the grief that walks into your building the following Monday. Nothing in your fleet program touches it. And your employees’ teenagers, the newest, highest-risk drivers in America, aren’t in your training system at all.
Internal education changes behavior when you build it for the whole driver instead of the badge:
- Put it where the repetition already lives. Onboarding. Safety meetings and tailgate talks. Wellness programming. Fleet and CDL training. Four decisions, 43 seconds, before the wheels turn.
- Have leadership do it out loud. If your VP of Operations runs her own 43 Key Seconds check before pulling out of the lot, it’s real. If it only lives in a slide deck, it isn’t.
- Send it home. Your employees’ families are your first community. Give your people something they can actually run with a 16-year-old in the driveway. That’s the highest-leverage 43 seconds in the entire program.
- Don’t do it with a poster. I wrote that last month and I’ll keep writing it. A flyer in the break room has never changed how anybody drove home.
Then push the same logic outward. Get behind the organizations already carrying this work into the schools, campuses, and communities where your workforce lives, Safe Driving Summits, teen driver programming, the local coalitions your State Highway Safety Office can point you to in an afternoon. Part 7 walked through how to do it with free federal toolkits and partner infrastructure that already exists. The on-ramps are built. They just need companies willing to use them.
The Ask Nobody Made From a Stage in Minneapolis
From Data to Action is the right theme. It also assumes the data’s there to act on. So let me tell you the part that didn’t make it into a keynote.
Go back to that 2025 estimate. It reports speeding. It reports belts. It reports motorcyclists, pedestrians, and cyclists. On impaired driving, it says the alcohol factor “has a significant reporting lag and is therefore not included in this report.” Distraction doesn’t show up in it at all.
It’s September 2026. The federal government can tell you how many Americans died last year speeding or unbuckled, and yet, due to incomplete or underreporting by state, county and local agencies, it can’t yet give you the full picture of how many died drunk or distracted. Two of the four behaviors doing most of the killing.
That’s not incompetence. That’s what an underfunded measurement system looks like at the very top of the pyramid.
Now scale that down to the organizations doing the delivery work.
Every serious company asks us the same two questions. What’s the return on this investment and show me the results. Those are fair questions. I’d ask them too, and any organization that resents being asked hasn’t thought hard enough about what stewardship of your money means.
MADD, SADD, Responsibility.org, and the other large, long-established organizations in this field can answer them well. They’ve had decades, dedicated staff, and evaluation budgets to build that muscle, and the whole field is better for it.
Newer and leaner organizations often can’t answer at that depth. Not because we don’t want the data, we want it more than you do. Telematics platforms cost real money. Program evaluation is a specialized hire, not something you hand to whoever’s got a light week. And a small team delivering programming across several states isn’t also building a longitudinal measurement infrastructure in its spare time.
I’m not offering that as an excuse. I’m offering it as a line item.
Here’s a yesterday’s approach hiding in plain sight: we fund the programming and assume the evidence shows up for free. Then we ask the field why it can’t prove what works.
If proof of impact is the price of admission to corporate philanthropy, and it should be, then somebody has to fund the turnstile. That’s the innovation Administrator Morrison was challenging and asking for. It isn’t glamorous. It’s a baseline, a spreadsheet, and a data engineer.
And it’s where Jennifer Smith’s point lands hardest. Our solutions aren’t siloed, so our capabilities shouldn’t be either. The most valuable thing your company can give roadway safety might not be a check at all. It might be the infrastructure you already own.
Five Ways to Be the Partner Who Closes the Gap
- Fund measurement as its own line. When you sponsor a program, fund the evaluation of it too, and name the figure. Ten to fifteen percent of a program budget changes what an organization can prove for years afterward.
- Share what your fleet already generates. Aggregated, anonymized behavior data, belt use, phone-handling events, speed events, hard-braking trends, is some of the most valuable research material in this field, and it’s sitting in a platform your risk team already pays for. Be a data partner, not just a donor.
- Lend a person, not just a budget. Forty hours of a data analyst’s time can build a measurement framework a nonprofit will use for a decade. Your corporate volunteer program almost certainly has no line for that. Create one.
- Sponsor independent evaluation. Fund a university transportation research center to evaluate a program with real academic rigor. You get third-party credibility for your reporting, and the field gets evidence that outlives any one company’s involvement.
- Write measurement into the agreement, with the money to do it. Don’t make strong data a precondition only well-capitalized organizations can meet. Make it a funded deliverable. That one change in how corporate agreements get structured would do more for this field’s evidence base than another decade of asking.
I’ll hold us to the same standard. Measurement is being built into how the 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative gets delivered, and every level of our corporate partnership structure comes with defined programming, defined deliverables, and defined ways to measure what you got. The tiers are at lutzie43.org/corporate-partnership, and I’m at doug@lutzie43.org if you want me to walk your team through where you’d fit.
And the standing caveat from May still holds. It doesn’t have to be the Lutzie 43 Foundation. There are outstanding organizations doing this work all over the country and in your community, and plenty of them need exactly the kind of measurement help I just described. Pick one. Just pick one this year.
My Ask This September
Three things, and none of them need a new department.
- One behavior. Ninety days. One number. Pick seat belt compliance. It’s the easiest to observe, the hardest to argue with, and the closest thing to a controlled experiment you’ll get. Baseline it, run 43 Key Seconds against it, and measure again in December. You’ll have real behavior data before your 2027 budget closes.
- Fund the measurement, not just the message. Whatever you give, and whoever you give it to, add the evaluation line. Ask what it costs to prove the program works and pay for that too.
- Lend what you’ve already got. Telematics access. An analyst. An evaluation framework your team built for something else entirely. That’s collaboration the way Jennifer Smith meant it, and it costs you almost nothing.
Reactive Regret to Proactive Responsibility
Philip Lutzenkirchen wore number 43 at Auburn, and the people who knew him talk less about the football than about how he made a room feel, the joy, the loyalty, the way he pulled people in. He was 23 years old. On June 29, 2014, a set of decisions made on a single night cost him his life and cost another family theirs.
His father, Mike, and the Lutzenkirchen family have spent more than a decade making sure those decisions teach something. 43 Key Seconds to educate and reinforce safe driving behaviors.
Live like Lutz. Love like Lutz. Learn from Lutz.
Everything above is one idea wearing different clothes.
- Four decisions before the car moves, instead of a lifetime of wishing they’d been made.
- A funded prevention program, instead of quietly absorbing the cost of crashes nobody tried to stop.
- Evidence built on purpose, instead of assembled from memory after the fact.
Sixteen straight quarters of progress prove this isn’t hopeless. One hundred deaths a day prove it isn’t finished. We’re still in the rut because it’s comfortable, and because both ends are dug out, so it still feels like forward motion. Climbing out takes exactly what Minneapolis kept naming: innovation, collaboration, and the boldness to fund something we’ve never funded before.
Hopeful,
Doug
doug@lutzie43.org | www.lutzie43.org
References
1. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Early Estimates of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities and Fatality Rate by Sub-Categories in 2025.” DOT HS 813 829. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813829
2. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Early Estimate of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities and Fatality Rate for the First Quarter of 2026.” DOT HS 813 833. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813833
3. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “Fatality Facts: State by State” (2024 data). https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state
4. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Drunk Driving.” https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving
5. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Speeding.” https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding
6. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Distracted Driving.” https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
7. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Seat Belts.” https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/seat-belts
8. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024.” https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm
9. Network of Employers for Traffic Safety. “Cost of Motor Vehicle Crashes to Employers, 2026.” https://trafficsafety.org/road-safety-resources/public-resources/cost-of-motor-vehicle-crashes-to-employers-2026/
10. Governors Highway Safety Association. 2026 Annual Meeting, “From Data to Action: Harnessing the Technology Revolution,” Minneapolis, MN, August 29 – September 2, 2026. https://www.ghsa.org/
11. National Safety Council. Preliminary estimates of 2025 motor-vehicle deaths and total societal loss; figures as presented by Anthony Abron, Director of Government Affairs, National Safety Council, at the GHSA 2026 Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/preliminary-estimates/
This Article Is Part of a Continuing Series, “My Challenge to Corporate America.” Explore the Series:
- Part 1 – A Challenge to Corporate America: It’s Time to Make Roadway Safety Part of Your 2026 Philanthropic and Social Responsibility Plans
- Part 2 – The Real Cost of Employee Roadway Incidents: What Companies Don’t See
- Part 3 – Roadway Safety: The Overlooked Philanthropic Opportunity in Corporate America
- Part 4 – Driving Is the Most Dangerous Thing We All Do Daily, So Why Don’t Companies Address It?
- Part 5 – The Power of Early Adopters: How Leading Companies Shape a Safer Future
- Part 6 – What I Learned on the Road, and What the 100 Deadliest Days Demand of Us Right Now
- Part 7 – How Corporations Can Influence Safer Communities Where Employees Live, Work and Play
- Part 8 – Integrating Roadway Safety into CSR and ESG: A Practical Guide for Companies